You say it about forty times before lunch. Tower stays up, good job. Shoes on the right feet, good job. Sat down at the table without being asked twice, good job. It leaves your mouth without passing through your brain, which at seven in the morning is exactly what you need from a sentence.
There’s a well-known study behind the advice to say something else. It’s smaller and shakier than the internet makes it sound.
What they actually did
Researchers recorded 53 families going about ordinary life at home, in sessions spread across the months when their children were one, two and three. Nobody was given a script. Then they went back through the recordings and sorted every piece of praise a parent had said into two piles.
- Praise for what the child did. “You worked hard at that.” “You found a good way to do it.” The researchers call this process praise.
- Praise for who the child is. “You’re so smart.” “Good girl.” They call this person praise.
Five years later, they came back, when the children were seven and eight. The children who had heard a higher share of process praise as toddlers were more likely to believe that people can get better at things, and more likely to choose a hard task over an easy one (Gunderson et al., 2013).
They went back again in fourth grade. The praise children heard before they were four predicted their math and reading comprehension scores seven years later, and the path ran through what those children had come to believe about whether ability can change (Gunderson et al., 2018).
What happened to this idea afterwards
Nobody assigned these families to praise one way or the other. The researchers observed what parents were already doing. Parents who naturally say “you worked hard” may differ from other parents in a dozen ways nobody measured, and any of those could be doing the work.
The wider idea this sits inside has also had a rough decade. When researchers pooled findings from 273 studies involving more than 365,000 people, the link between these beliefs and school achievement was weak. When they pooled the attempts to actually change those beliefs across 43 studies and more than 57,000 people, the effects were weak there too (Sisk et al., 2018). Same story as the marshmallow test: a striking early result, a lot of enthusiasm, then a slow correction.
So how you praise probably nudges things, gently, over years. One “good girl” has never damaged a child, and if you’ve said it ten thousand times, you haven’t broken anything.
One finding about girls
In that same study, boys received significantly more process praise than girls did. Five years on, the boys were also more likely to think intelligence could be improved (Gunderson et al., 2013). Nobody in those houses was trying to do that. It only showed up because somebody counted.
A shape to try
- Say what you saw. “You kept going when it wobbled.” It takes the same two seconds as “good job,” and it tells her something she didn’t already know.
- Notice out loud without praising at all. “You put the red ones together.” Children light up at being seen, and you don’t have to fake any enthusiasm.
- Save the big reaction for the effort. The tower that fell down took just as much work as the one that stayed up.
- Keep “good job.” It’s a useful, cheerful noise. Let it be one thing you say rather than the only thing.
- If you have a girl, count for a day. Just notice what you’re praising her for. Most of us would be surprised.
Where the evidence runs out
- Fifty-three families, carrying seven years of conclusions.
- Observational. It shows praise and later beliefs travelling together. It can’t show that changing your praise changes your child.
- The big pooled analyses found weak effects across this whole family of ideas.
- Nobody has tested the five suggestions above.
Sources
- Gunderson, E. A., Gripshover, S. J., Romero, C., Dweck, C. S., Goldin-Meadow, S., & Levine, S. C. (2013). Parent praise to 1–3 year-olds predicts children’s motivational frameworks 5 years later. Child Development, 84(5), 1526–1541. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12064
- Gunderson, E. A., Sorhagen, N. S., Gripshover, S. J., Dweck, C. S., Goldin-Meadow, S., & Levine, S. C. (2018). Parent praise to toddlers predicts fourth grade academic achievement via children’s incremental mindsets. Developmental Psychology, 54(3), 397–409. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000444
- Sisk, V. F., Burgoyne, A. P., Sun, J., Butler, J. L., & Macnamara, B. N. (2018). To what extent and under which circumstances are growth mind-sets important to academic achievement? Two meta-analyses. Psychological Science, 29(4), 549–571. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617739704
Plumble’s World is a calm, gentle media experience for children ages 2 to 5. It is not a therapeutic or clinical program, and it is not a substitute for advice from your pediatrician.